Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Near the Water. A daffy piece of South Pacifiction, based on William Brinkley's novel about some officers and men engaged in the Navy's public relations-and their own private affairs (TIME...
...hero of this novel ferries forth on the river Styx as matter-of-factly as if he were boating at a church social. Floyd Walker is a handsome, 32-year-old bank teller-and sparetime choirmaster-who has leukemia. With apologetic hems and haws, the town doctor of Ophelia, Mo. announces the sentence: three months, more or less, to live. In sleepy little Ophelia (pronounced "afailure") the drama of life has no acts, only intermissions, and Floyd is scarcely prepared for center stage in the town's morbidly engaged affections. He makes only one promise to himself: "From...
Left with little more than the small change of his existence, Floyd spends it on the minor characters with whom Author Hauser has rounded out her novel. Among them: a booze-prone church organist who bikes his empties out into the country rather than stash the incriminatory bottles in his ash barrel; a lady reincarnationist who believes she once dined with a Pharaoh; the town's Mary Magdalene with whom Floyd finds it sweet to sin. These and other forlorn rebels form a kind of Freudian chorus attesting the ego-twisting power of convention...
...symbollixed up her main character so thoroughly that it is never clear whether he is the old Adam, the fool-in-Christ, or just plain fool. Author Hauser has a sharp eye and sure words for the homeliest of scenes, e.g., "an empty clothesline strung with rain pearls." Her novel is best when her people are worst-sparrow-agile before the flung bird seed of gossip, and vulture-ugly as they pick clean the bones of a reputation or a life in whispers...
Author Presser, 58, himself a Jew and a professor of history at Amsterdam University, lost his first wife in an extermination camp, lived in hiding in Holland until war's end. What he has written is not a horror novel, despite its horrible theme. It is, rather, a deeply moving story of the terror that lies beyond remorse for the man who fails himself by failing others...